


here, here, and here

by achillese



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Post-Hell, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achillese/pseuds/achillese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s not dead. Michael would know, would’ve felt the lack of a pulse, would’ve felt the human grow cold and stiff with rigor mortis. He’s just not there, and Michael doesn’t know where he went.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here, here, and here

Michael carries around a shell. 

He carries it slung over his shoulder, or in his arms, cradling it to his chest tightly as though making sure it wouldn’t dissipate into thin air. If they’re lucky and they stumble across a car or a bus stop, Michael is given a reprieve as he puts his companion down in the seat next to him. People in public usually try their hardest not to stare, but every once in a while Michael catches sight of some nosy human trying to crane their neck to get a better look at Michael’s companion, and he has try to his hardest not to launch himself at them. _How dare you look at him like that? He’s worth twenty of you._

The shell has a name, of course, but Michael can’t bring himself to say it. It’s not him, not entirely, anyway. It’s just empty. _He’s_ empty.

He’s not dead. Michael would know, would’ve felt the lack of a pulse, would’ve felt the human grow cold and stiff with rigor mortis. He’s just not there, and Michael doesn’t know where he went. Somewhere locked inside his own body, probably where Michael last left him, scaring him off into a corner where even now he refused to come out.

_Gone._

\--

“Your friend asleep?” The woman across the bus aisle asks.

Michael doesn’t need to look at the body next to him to know that the boy’s eyes aren’t open. “Yes. It’s been a long trip.”

The woman – young, almost a girl really, with blonde hair and green eyes – nods in understanding, even though Michael knows she couldn’t possibly. “Where’d you guys get on?”

“Boise.” A lie.

She whistled low. “ _Sounds_ like a long trip.”

Michael nods in return and faces forward again, intent on ending the conversation there. The girl seems to understand because she coughs softly and retreats back into her seat. 

Michael’s grateful. He hates making conversation. 

But he hates having an unconscious companion more.

\--

Michael doesn’t know why he carries the body with him. For all intents and purposes, the boy’s as good as dead, even if he really isn’t, and it would make Michael’s life easier if he just dumped the body in a ditch somewhere and let some unfortunate hiker stumble across the remains...but he knows he can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right, or proper, or fair, or noble. 

So Michael carries him.

It’s the least he can do.

\--

Michael doesn’t like leaving the body alone for very long, but sometimes it’s necessary. He knows he could probably pull off pushing him around in a wheelchair with a pair of sunglasses over his eyes, but Michael doesn’t want to take chances just yet, so he leaves the body in the hotel rooms he rents for them whenever they can’t find a car to crash in. 

He doesn’t just leave it lying there though – he pulls the blankets over it, tucks it in, makes sure the pillow is fluffed properly.

He might wake up while Michael’s gone.

He never does.

\--

The body never moves but one day Michael can sense disturbance in its once-empty mind. 

He’s driving a stolen Cadillac when he senses it and the shock of its unexpected appearance nearly causes him to run right off the road. As it is, he still has the good sense to pull over onto the shoulder immediately and lean over the boy’s body.

“Adam?” he asks, hoping.

It’s the first time he’s said the boy’s name since they crawled from the crack in the earth, with Adam slung over Michael’s shoulder. 

Adam doesn’t open his eyes or make a sound, but Michael can still sense his mind at work, trying to regain its balance, trying to come back.

Fighting, as always.

\--

Two more bus tickets and a hotel room later.

“I wish you’d wake up,” Michael admits to the boy on the bed.

Take the first two words and you could write an entire novel filled with the things Michael wished.

\--

Adam fights to wake up and Michael fights to keep him protected, but the archangel knows once Adam’s awake he’ll probably want nothing to do with Michael. 

That’s fine by him. He just needs to make sure Adam gets to that point.

\--

The first thing Adam does when he wakes up, while they’re in another seedy motel, is he punches Michael in the nose. Michael bleeds like a human but still has all the indignation of an archangel, and he demands fifty variations of an apology before Adam finally gives in and gives him a halfhearted, “Sorry,” weakened mostly by the fact that his body was terribly malnourished and, for all intents and purposes, dead. 

“You carried me all this way,” Adam says later, and Michael hears the surprise in his voice.

“I did.”

“I would’ve just left you.” There’s no apology in the truth of Adam’s words.

Michael shrugs. “I’m not you,” he says simply, and leaves it at that.

_No, but you once were._

\--

It’s easier with Adam awake. He can buy his own food, his own tickets, wash his own body, change his own clothes. But he’s also a bigger burden in that he doesn’t stop talking, or complaining, or singing when he thinks Michael can’t hear him in the shower, but he can. 

“That was a nice song,” Michael comments when the boy exits the bathroom with a towel around his waist, hoping maybe Adam will get the hint and stop the shower serenades.

But instead it just prompts Adam to sing the next verse louder while he rifles through his clothes drawer, and it takes all of Michael’s self control not to throw the mattress at him.

\--

“Where to next?” Adam asks as they pull out of the hotel driveway.

Michael turns the car east just out of instinct, but aloud he says, “I don’t know. Anywhere. Do you have a place in mind?”

“Not really.” There’s a pause. “Aren’t you gonna go back to Heaven anytime soon?”

Michael shakes his head. “I’m not ready.”

Take those words and add ‘ _to leave you_ ’ at the end and you have the whole truth of it, but Michael doesn’t say anything more, and Adam doesn’t ask.

He never does. Even months later, when Michael’s pushing him back onto another hotel mattress and kissing a line up his jaw, he doesn’t ask. He already knows.


End file.
